


Right down the line

by Aeshna etonensis (GMWWemyss)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Carlo Gesualdo, Early music, Gen, John Dowland, London Underground, M/M, Musical References, Radio 4, Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Thomas Tallis - Freeform, Turlough O Carolan, William Byrd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 22:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3427919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GMWWemyss/pseuds/Aeshna%20etonensis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which (in defiance of all convention) two travellers on the Tube indulge a public quarrel over tastes in music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right down the line

**Author's Note:**

> I have seen stories filling a prompt in which, on what is mysteriously called a ‘subway’, there is a ‘meet-cute’, beginning with one character’s barracking the music tastes of another.
> 
> This struck me as challenging, in that it required (O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!) the Most Un-British element of two strangers _speaking_ to one another, not merely upon a train, but upon (gasp! ’Orrible Revelations in ’Igh Life! _Eeeeeeev’n’n StaaaaanD’D_!) the _Tube._ (In addition, of course, quarrels over modern pop bore me unutterably. (I am, there’s no blinking it, something of a musical purist, if not a musical snob.))
> 
> It then occurred to me, But what if the characters weren’t, strictly, _strangers?_
> 
> Thus this jape.

* * *

* * *

The Romans of the Republic, we are told, regarded it as un-Roman, as shewing a barbarian lack of _gravitas,_ for a citizen to embrace his wife in public. So much so, indeed, that, were he so lost to self-respect as to do so, the Censors, acting for the whole of the Senate and People, should become involved, implacably. There is no guessing how many barbarian visitors to The City, over the years, came to grief through not realising that.

Even in the other Home Nations today, but most of all in England, a similar view is taken of Speaking To Strangers On a Train. (There is no counting how many Americans – ‘Waaall,  _Hi,_ there, I’m Randy and this is my wife, Fanny’ – and other barbarian visitors have come to grief through not realising this.) In such country districts as have rural lines which escaped the heavy wielding of Dr Beeching’s axe, there may be – outwith First – a certain amount of desultory conversation, but this is at most the talking of shop by neighbours of a bucolic and agricultural sort (consisting largely, with variations according to district and season, upon commiserations over the diseases of sheep or rust in wheat, and, universally, in comminations upon the heads of Defra and the Environment Agency), or by villagers, both of whom, as types, recognise, even have they not the advantage of a formal introduction, a kindred agrarian even in the tweeds or corduroy of the stranger; yet even this is rare, and purely a local phenomenon, on the Flanders-and-Swann-like ‘slow trains’. Otherwise, it partakes, to the middle-class mind, far too much of the lower classes, crammed together in carriages of equally lower class, on cheap Bank ’Oliday excursion trains to such Utterly Naff places as Margate and Blackpool, or ‘gooin’ oop London for t’ Cup Final’ or some damned thing. From the ensuing contempt and judgement, only the whispered conversations of trainspotting anoraks are exempt, with the charity one extends to the obviously and harmlessly mad. (The genteel may resent,  _almost_ audibly, the occasional braying of persons of rank and title who spot a recognisable old school tie worn by someone they don’t know, but they do not dare to do more than shoot nasty glances at the Upper Classes.)

And if this is true of, say, fast up trains to Town, it is doubly so of the Underground. Travellers upon the Tube are savage in defence of their privacy: partly because the proportion of chavs, twats, tourists, and trippers who are served by TfL is so high. (There is no guessing how many broadsheets, berliners, tabloids, and devices, rely for their London sales upon the want of the Tube commuter for a barrier between himself and the barbarian horde.) Although imperfectly, the combination of tut-tuttery, public shaming, resolute refusal to acknowledge strangers, and the occasional, and occasionally effective, forays of the Transport Police, has tended over the years to reduce the incidence of incidents on the Tube, and it is often possible to embark upon the Underground without fearing any greater annoyance than an intolerable crush.

This happy state of affairs does not, however, commonly obtain upon certain Tube trains emanating from the Edgware Road Tube station for the Bakerloo line, and particularly those to Baker Street and thence on the Jubilee Line to Canada Water. This is owing to the number of student digs in Shoreditch and Islington and the ungentrified bits of Rotherhithe and such places, and to the not-unrelated fact that students from the Royal Academy of Music and those of the Royal College of Music tend to come together at Edgware Road, the former on foot to the station and the latter from the interchange of the Piccadilly and Bakerloo Lines at Piccadilly Station: these coming from, ultimately, South Kensington.

The chaff and musical ‘shop’ is commonly inoffensive and often at once amusing and educational. All the same, it is a violation, even at its best, of the unwritten rules of Tube travel, and accordingly resented by other travellers.

And it is not always at its best.

 

* * *

A tallish young man with the face of a sweet-natured boy and the body of a rugger international and ’Ard Man was listening, rather too loudly, to a madrigal marked by an unnatural quality of dissonance and chromaticism, the sound of which bled faintly out beyond the ambit of his ear-buds. This did not appear to disturb the lad seated next him, a handsome and improbably blond Irish youth who almost always wore a smile and was more often than not either laughing or, in blatant violation of every rule and courtesy and custom of the Tube, eating (not in the least surreptitiously); regular travellers on the line had noted, over the course of many journeys, that it was always best that the young Irishman be laughing or smiling, as, when he was not, one noted with unease the hardness of the eyes, the firmness of the mouth, and the aggressive jut of the chin. Seasoned commuters had also noted, if they cared to note, that this Son of Eire became, reliably, a Son of Ire if ever his large but pacific companion, whom he seemed to regard with a brother’s protectiveness, were challenged, insulted, or affronted. And contrariwise: for the peaceable, kindly, sweet-faced lad with the body of a winger and the thews to match, very much had the Irishman’s back in any dispute. The two had, as fellow commuters knew, come from Piccadilly Circus via Baker Street. (Even when there were severe delays, RCM students and RAM students alike could perfectly well, and much more simply, have taken other lines and trains and buses, or gone to Whitechapel, all change on the Overground for Shoreditch.... The fact was, it was reasonably clear to other travellers, the two sets of students _chose_ to meet and mingle on inconvenient Tube trains because they _liked_ the chaff and quarrels; they _wished_ for the time together, if only to barrack one another: _When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war..._ ).

If the escaped music which absorbed the athletic youth did not disturb his travelling companion, it seemed to perturb, of the other travellers, one young man the most. This youth, also a regular traveller, was commonly accompanied, for all his aloof and self-contained air, by a tall, fawn-legged faun possessed of curly hair, startling green eyes, ever-present dimples, and the general air of an infant Mick Jagger; and by a cinnamon-coloured, blue-eyed, sharp-tongued Yorkshire pixie whose bum (generally rather possessively cradled by the Laughing Faun in one large hand) was just less notable than his accent. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, the Faun and the Pixie, stunning though they were, tended to fade in the consciousness into near-invisibility (although hardly into a blessed inaudibility) once other travellers saw their companion. For he: silent, self-contained, superior: had the looks of a god who had condescended to walk a catway at London Fashion Week, and even the fiercest of Lesbians and the most adamantly heterosexual of men found themselves joining the rest of the travellers in making him the cynosure of all eyes.

They had heard him speak but rarely, and then almost inaudibily, to the Pixie and the Faun – also in a Northern accent.

Mrs Margery Backe was long married into an old family of Kent ( _not_ a Kentish family: her late husband’s set of Backes were very much Men and Maids of Kent, dwelling Jutishly East and South of the River Medway and scattered thick upon the ground of Canterbury All Saints and adjacent districts and parishes); but her maiden name was Erskine, and she had been born, longer ago than she cared to let on, at Newton Stewart. She possessed in full measure the imaginative sympathy of the woman – and Radio 4 writer – she was, and the insatiable curiosity of the common-or-garden Lowland or Border Scot she had been born. For some years now, beginning on the Piccadilly Line herself, she had covertly observed and speculated on these five lads, from the days when they’d met at another station altogether and had taken very different routes to that they now took (evidently an earlier set of digs had been ‘up the Cally’, puir dears: it hardly bore thinking about, innocent lambs of students reduced to digs in the Caledonian Road). She had grasped – with pride in her percipience, as her long-time fellow travellers evidently had _not_ grasped – that the two sets of students, even when submerged in hangers-on from their several institutions, were, as a set of five, bonded by a certain fugitive and hidden affection beneath the raillery and, it seemed, rivalry. She had speculated quietly upon the five lads, as is the displeasing habit of writers, imagining their lives, puzzling out their backgrounds (the Faun – ‘Harry’, she’d heard him called – was clearly a product of some leafy dormitory town amidst the WAGs of Cheshire, socially and educationally a cut above the rest, and quite likely the product of what had been in fact if not in name a good grammar school; the Pixie, whose name she knew must be either ‘Thomas’ or ‘Louis’, made no secret of being a boisterous and shirty son of Doncaster, with shoulder-chips on – which seemed apt, as he combined the volume of Brian Blessed and the blatant carelessness of Jeremy Clarkson, two other noted sons of Doncaster – and boisterously and shirtily working-class (with shoulder-chips on); the Irishman was, simply, Irish, in the most Chestertonian of ways; the rugger-bugger with a twist was, by the other students in a body, ragged rather regularly as a Midlands yokel – Wolverhampton, Margery rather thought –; and the Utterly Gorgeous Young Man – ‘Zain’, was it? – was quite evidently of mixed heritage, partly British Pakistani, and, if his companions’ conversation were at all truthful, from Bradford).

She was not a young woman now, admitted Margery, and was duly thankful: there was much to be said for maturity: but she was a woman, and one with an appreciation of beauty generally and male pulchritude in particular. And there was, thought she, no real question but that these five were some of the most toothsome young men she or anyone had ever been privileged to see; and, for her taste, the Midlands athlete and the Antinous of Bradford were even in that company joint first.

Mrs Backe and her fellow commuters had heard the latter, the Greek god of the West Riding, speak but rarely, and then almost inaudibily, to the Pixie and the Faun – _in_ a Northern accent; but, after some five minutes of his fidgeting under the aural assault of the Midlands athlete’s music, he spoke now, audibly, truculently, and in violation of every norm of Tube behaviour and every precedent of the relations between the five lads which Margery had observed in the past.

‘Mate. _Mate._ ’

The sporty fit one didn’t open his eyes.

‘ _You,_ sunshine,’ said The One Margery Rather Thought Was Named ‘Zain’. ‘ _OI!_ _YOU!_ ’

Margery Backe was not alone in expecting that The Irish One should bounce up on his feet and do his rabid terrier turn. They were surprised when he caught the eyes of the Pixie and the Faun, and grinned.

Liam – Margery made certain she’d got _that_ one’s name off by heart – looked up at last, when Zain-Wasn’t-It? stood combatively over him.

‘Your taste in music’s shit, mate,’ said (call him) Zain (however it was spelt). His eyes were glittering, and his gaze simply blazed. ‘But _this_ is shit even for you.’

Margery (and not a few other commuters) was surprised by this frontal attack (and that the other three, rather than jump in the fray, were suppressing grins, and that the other students were hanging thrilled on every word and not intervening – or choosing sides); she nor the other travellers were at all surprised when Fit Sporty Liam stood in response, broader and more obviously muscled than He Whose Name Began With a Zed, and a bit taller, and stared unwaveringly back. ‘You’ve a problem with it, _mate?_ ’

‘Yeah – _mate._ Bloody dissonance and that, and the mannerist approach is rubbishing. Campion was right, it’s childish and ridiculous: sodding bloody _risos_ and _sospiros_ –’

‘I know the education’s a bit lacking at _your_ place, _mate,_ but it’s Gesualdo.’

‘Yeah,’ sneered (let us say) Zain. ‘Prince, murderer, and bastard grandfather of Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Berg, and bloody _Cage._ Wish it _were_ Cage, maybe he’d go _silent_ –’

‘Yeah, _mate,_ as if I’m interested in the opinion of a _Dowland_ fanboy.’

The Pixie sniggered, treacherously, in the background. Zed-Something’s eyes narrowed. ‘Care to tell me what you mean by that? _Mate?_ ’

‘ _Dowland,_ ’ sneered Liam. ‘The early-music snob’s answer to emo, bist John Bleeding Dowland. Renascence Leonard Cohen’s simply not in it.’ He made a show of inspecting the other’s fingernails. ‘Surprised you’re not wearing black nail-polish. It’d go so well with the black hair and the kohl and the “O-Look-At-Me-I-Am-a-Tortured- _Artist_ ” vibe.’

The Irish one – “Niall”, perhaps? Margery interrogated her memory – was no longer bothering to hide his grins. ‘Ah, Payno, but y’ love a lad in –’

The disputants were not attending to their friends. ‘You,’ said the fan of the lachrymose Dowland, ‘wouldn’t recognise an authentic ficta if one went up your arse.’

‘And Our Zayn’s an _expert_ on –’ The Pixie was cut off by the Faun, who resorted to the simple expedient of clapping a huge hand over the Pixie’s gob. (Margery took note of the accompanying, hissed scolding, in which Harry the Faun chanced to apostrophise his obvious lover as ‘Louis Tomlinson’, in full and _in extenso,_ thus resolving the question which had perplexed Margery for months, and explaining why his friends referred to the Pixie, indifferently, both as ‘Lou’ and as ‘Tommo’.)

Liam smirked. ‘Hate to tell you – _mate_ – but _musica recta_ doesn’t mean, “music you pull out of your arse”.’

The Greek chorus of other students responded with a rather harmonic murmur. The Irishman crowed with laughter (Harry and Louis were by now otherwise engaged, as the latter’s response to having had the former’s hand over his mouth had involved, as their current activities more directly now involved, tongue); the defender of Dowland (what _was_ his name, wondered Margery) pinned the Irishman with an electric glare. ‘Go play a harp, Nialler: _your_ idea of early music is _Carolan_.’

Niall put up two fingers. ‘Power, Dunstaple, Hygons … _Jaysus,_ Zayn, y’ bang on about t’e English choral tradition as if it were more nor dim gropings towards Parry and Stanford and Elgar and Bridge and RVW. Sure, and –’

As Mrs Backe filed away the Greek god’s name with certainty this time, Louis broke off long enough to decry Niall’s heresy: ‘The only decent things Vaughan Williams ever wrote, you barbarian Mick, were based on folk tunes – and _Tallis_.’

‘And y’ say t’at only because Tallis looked like yer hipster boyfriend.’

Harry frowned, like a toddler. He preferred Byrd in any case, and he really didn’t think he looked very like Thomas Tallis.

‘Zayn,’ said Liam, ‘– I’ll wager – only got into Tallis owing to the _Fifty Shades_ shit.’

Zayn gasped with affront. ‘ _You_ ought to be spanked for that.’

Harry collapsed against Louis, leading what became general giggles amongst the watching students of the two conservatoires (and a certain amount of lubricious fanning of selves on the part of a goodly number of young men and not a few young women, who were picturing the conjured scene).

Niall stood. ‘Haz; Tommo. Dinner, eh, and pints. We’ll take a later train – or t’e 188 – all right, Tommo, or t’e 381 – bus.’ He turned to Liam and Zayn. ‘We’ll stay out until 9.0, 9.30, and no later. So you’ll – ah, Chrisht, just see ye’ve shagged it out before t’en, but. It’s sick I am – and Haz and Tommo – of t’e bot’ o’ ye, when y’ start in wit’ foreplay on t’e Tube. Our flat’s not _large_ enough....’

Margery blinked. Writer though she was, she had not, and admitted she had not, seen _that_ coming – though it explained much. Nor, by their gobsmacked expressions, had her fellow travellers, bar most of the RCM and RAM student contingent.

‘’M not sure,’ said Harry, slowly, as he and Louis moved to join Niall at the door, as the train ran in to Bermondsey, ‘I want to dine with a man who thinks Byrd and Mundy were first attempts at Gerald Finzi or Herbert Howells.’

Niall guffawed. ‘And t’e funny t’ing is, I’m t’e only _practisin’_ Cat’olic in t’e lot of us.’

The doors opened and they tumbled out, not at all mindful of the gap, Niall declaiming on the pub grub and real ale at a wee place-een he knew of, and it was just ’round the corner, it was....

Liam and Zayn hardly noticed. Liam had resumed his seat; and rather than let Zayn sit where Niall had sat, had pulled Zayn down into his lap, where they could more conveniently bicker happily between _quite_ improperly snogging on the Tube. ‘You … bloody drama queen … simply because you wanted _attention...._ ’ Preening, Zayn did not even bother to deny Liam’s soft impeachment.

Evidently, the breach of all standards had a knock-on effect, even on the Tube. The youngish woman on her left leaned slightly towards Margery, and spoke quietly. ‘That’d’ve made a great “meet-cute” in a screenplay – were they not together already.’

_Or radio,_ thought Margery.

Before she could pursue the thought further, her neighbour sighed. ‘And they’re so _pretty,_ separately _and_ together. Of course, all the good ones are gay.’

Margery smiled. ‘Och, my dear. Speaking as a widow, I can only say: Not always. Or: they weren’t, when I was your age.’

The young woman laughed, and apologised for the implication. Margery smiled and nodded in response, but she was hardly attending. As is the deplorable habit of writers, she was already transmuting the base metal of mundane factual inspiration into the gold of Story.

She did not repine even when – having observed (with detachment and at most a quarter of her attention) the departure, in a sort of walking embrace, of Liam and Zayn at _their_ station (Canada Water) – she came back to herself at Canning Town and realised she had wholly missed her own station (North Greenwich, for the leafy, village-y bits of Charlton).

After all: she’d an ‘Afternoon Drama’ to write up.

* * *

FINIS

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> As London is a metropolis I do my best to avoid (as I do any metropolis, or indeed town, if possible, including Swindon. _Particularly_ Swindon) – one goes up to Town only reluctantly and for a cause which impels one to do so (it is after all where one’s club is, and one’s tailor and shirtmaker and hatter and bootmaker, and, naturally, one’s barber, and it _does_ house Lord’s and the Oval) – and as the Tube represents very much the sort of thing which _causes_ one to avoid cities, I am indebted to TfL for unwitting assistance in my preparing this inanity, and I apologise to any Londoners if I have got any bits wrong. (Salisbury and Warminster are _much_ easier to get about in, although far too urban for my taste.)


End file.
